One of the common issues that can arise on poorly maintained websites are dead links. They can frustrate website users and harm your search engine ranking. In this blog post, we will discuss what dead links are, how they affect your website, and what steps you can take to fix them.
What is a dead link in HTML?
A dead link, also known as a broken link, is a hyperlink to a website that no longer works (it was deleted or moved). It leads visitors to a 404 error page if it is internal, or to an unavailable page if it is external.
Dead links should be detected and fixed as soon as possible because they have a negative impact on SEO, and can frustrate website users when they are not redirected to the page they are looking for.
To fix the dead link you should just update its href attribute with the correct value or remove a link if it is impossible to change it.
How to detect dead links on the website?
There are many tools to find dead links on the website. If you have a WordPress website, you can use Broken Link Checker plugin, to detect them. You can also use free W3C Link Checker, which goes through all links on provided website and checks if they are correct. Finally, if your website is connected to Google Search Console you can also check crawling errors by looking at the indexing coverage page and checking if there are any internal 404 errors (if Google is trying to index some not available pages, that’s mean your or some external website is linking to this unavailable pages).
Of course, there are also some paid tools to detect dead links on the website, like Ahrefs or SEMrush, and you can use them as well.
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